The Department of Defense (DoD) sent an email to all of its civilian employees today asking them to list five things they accomplished last week, an official at the DoD confirmed to MeriTalk.
The email follows a memorandum Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued on Feb. 27 and a video posted to social media on Sunday asking civilian employees to respond to a forthcoming email from the department. Hegseth gave civilian employees 48 hours to respond to the email.
“It’s a simple task, really. As Elon [Musk] said, as the president recognized in our first cabinet meeting, just a pulse check, ‘Are you there?’ out to DoD civilians,” Hegseth said in the video shared to social media on Sunday.
Hegseth said data collected from the email responses will be consolidated internally throughout the DoD to comply with a Feb. 22 directive from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) asking Federal agency employees to list what they did in the previous week.
Pentagon leaders originally told employees to hold off on responding to OPM’s Feb. 22 email. Hegseth said the initial pause was due to concerns about sharing sensitive information.
“We work on topics of national security, of sensitivity, of classification, we needed to be careful on that front,” Hegseth said.
The new email instruction is meant to avoid providing sensitive information on national security topics by allowing employees to respond with “basic” information on their completed tasks.
“Provide-without any classified or sensitive information-basic topics of what you did last week,” Hegseth said about Monday’s email instruction to civilian employees.
“We will take that into consideration as we make sure we’re being as focused and as tailored as possible in looking at how we streamline our workforce to both meet the fiscal demands of the moment but to also ensure we have the strongest, most viable fighting force in the world,” Hegseth said.
Elon Musk, an advisor to President Trump who is the animating force behind the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), replied to Hegseth’s video in a post to social media, indicating approval for the DoD’s email program.
Musk posted several messages to social media regarding OPM’s Feb. 22 directive, threatening that employees would be fired if they did not respond.
FEVS Delay
As agencies look to reevaluate their workforces, OPM announced in a memo on Friday it is reintroducing a question about poor performers to the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS).
OPM is also removing questions related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) as well as removing “gender ideology” questions from the survey.
FEVS is typically administered in May but OPM said it is delaying the survey “to reduce the administrative burden on agencies as they address President Trump’s urgent government wide priorities-many of which have upcoming deadlines.”
According to OPM, the survey will now include a question about poor performers that was removed by the Biden administration: “In my work unit, steps are taken to deal with a poor performer who cannot or will not improve.”
Thirteen DEIA questions will be removed from the survey which were added in 2022, according to OPM’s memo.
The memo did not specify when the FEVS survey would kick off this year.
